The World Has Just 10 Years to Get Climate Change Under Control

Global emissions have yet to reach a peaking point, and the top scientific body for climate change research says nations need to take “unprecedented” actions to cut carbon emissions over the next decade to avoid catastrophic climate change and to hold warming to moderate levels.

Global emissions continue to rise and the United States — is set to roll back Obama-era climate measures and is trying to legally exit the 2015 paris climate accord. But to avoid a global disaster and to keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celcius (2.7 degrees fahrenheit) nations need to transform human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened in history.

Total annual carbon dioxide emissions of about 40 billion tons a year, would need to have a steep downward path by 2030 to keep the temperature at 1.5 degrees or to allow for a slight “overshoot” of temperatures. It would be necessary to phase out the burning of coal almost completely by the year 2050.

“The report says the world will need to develop large-scale “negative emissions” programs to remove significant volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Although the basic technologies exist, they have not caught on widely, and scientists have strongly questioned whether such a program can be scaled up in the brief period available.

The bottom line, Sunday’s report found, is that the world is woefully off target.

Current promises made by countries as part of the Paris climate agreement would lead to about 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the end of the century, and the Trump administration recently released an analysis assuming about 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 if the world takes no action.”